ARTIST RESIDENCY
ANNA-LENA KRAUSE, 2026
Ca’ Riviera is pleased to announce the inaugural edition of its Artist Residency Programme, welcoming Berlin-born, London-based artist Anna-Lena Krause for a period of research and production. The residency reflects Ca’ Riviera’s mission to support contemporary artistic practice by offering artists the opportunity to slow down, experiment and engage deeply with a specific context. Rather than focusing solely on production, the programme provides space for research, reflection and exchange, fostering meaningful encounters between artists, curators, collectors and the wider cultural community.
The residency will unfold in three interconnected phases: an initial period of research, performance development, followed by a moment of reflection and decompression, culminating in the production of new sculptural and performative works. During the residency, Anna-Lena will expand her ongoing investigation into the relationships between bodies, materiality and space through a new body of sculptural and performance work. Working with glass for the first time alongside metal, the artist will translate her existing visual language of bodily relation and negative space into new material forms. Alongside these sculptures, Anna-Lena will develop a new performance exploring how bodies occupy space across time, inviting performers and artists to join her residency. Following the live presentation, the moving-image installation will remain on view, functioning not as documentation but as an altered continuation of the performance itself. Anna-Lena Krause’s practice spans sculpture, performance and digital fabrication. Beginning with live encounters, she employs 3D body scanning, digital reconstruction and sculptural casting to investigate how bodies transform as they move between physical, digital and material states.
Originally from Berlin, Anna-Lena holds a BA from the University of Applied Sciences Berlin and an MA from the Royal College of Art, London, where she was awarded the Rose Finn-Kelcey Scholarship. Her work has been exhibited internationally at institutions including Somerset House, Saatchi Gallery, C/O Berlin, KUMU Art Museum, Alice Black Gallery and Guts Gallery. The works developed during the residency, together with the newly commissioned performance, will be presented through a program of exhibitions and public events in Venice and beyond, extending the dialogue initiated during the residency to an international audience.
Throughout the residency, Ca’ Riviera will also open selected moments of the artistic process through private studio visits, offering collectors, curators, institutions and invited guests the opportunity to engage directly with the artist’s research as it unfolds. More than a production programme, the Ca’ Riviera Artist Residency aims to become a platform where artistic experimentation, critical dialogue and long-term relationships can emerge, positioning the residency as an evolving space for contemporary artistic practice and international cultural exchange.
PAST EXHIBITIONS
THE SHAPE OF THE SELF, 2026
The Shape of the Self / La Forma del Sé
“I is another.
If copper awakens trumpet, it is not its fault.
For me this is evident: I witness the unfolding of my thought; I watch it, I listen to it; I launch a bow stroke:
the symphony moves in the depths, or jumps on stage.”
Arthur Rimbaud, sixteen, in the Letter of the Seer
At the boundary between definition of self and fluidity of thought, Rimbaud anticipated what would be at the center of many modern reflections on psyche and art: the self understood as a continuously moving process, investigated through the senses, the body, and perception. The theme of visionary experience is connected to prophecy, expressing the human capacity to intuit the beyond without declaring it and to perceive possible life as a sensitive entity in continuous evolution. In this context, Symbolist intuition opens the way to a description of the “shape of the self” intimate and aesthetic, which manifests in the tension between the desire to establish defined boundaries and the will to embody something corporeal or emotional. In the exhibition “The Shape of the Self / La Forma del Sé”, hosted at Ca’ Riviera and in collaboration with Cassina Projects of Milan, three authors make tangible the idea of an evanescent metamorphosis through the spirit of their research and the works exhibited, establishing a historical dialogue between the avant-gardes of the 20th century and the present and demonstrating how this theme remains current and capable of redefining itself in the contemporary. Research dedicated to the surrealist artist Leonor Fini explores the self by constructing a staging of her unconscious, a “spell in the form of an autobiographical assertion” that expresses the constant tension to define and liberate the condition of being a woman and an artist. Cecilia Granara, on the other hand, gives painting a universal dimension, recalling elements of spirituality and stream of consciousness, in a practice, projected towards the viewer, that is configured as a collective language exploring the relationship between body and nature through emotional registers and states of transcendence. The work of Yves Scherer focuses on recording reality, investigating the boundary between reality and fiction, and through the analysis of media and spectacle culture, highlights the contradictions and the continuous reshaping of images and meanings, transforming familiar idols into new narratives and showing the fluidity of the self in a present dominated by spectacularization. For their opening, Ca’ Riviera hosts artists Chiara Capellini and Sedef Gali with their artworks and installations. Though their styles differ, their practices converge in a subtle exploration of perception and the invisible layers of reality.
Text by Maria Chiara Valacchi
Photo Louis De Belle
Artists
LEONOR FINI. YVES SCHERER. CECILIA GRANARA.
CHIARA CAPELLINI. SEDEF GALI.
ON VIEW MAY 10 - JUL 18 2026
MIRA, VENICE
